Perhaps the only thing that changes more rapidly than technology in today's amped-up digital environment is the terminology used to describe that technology and its impact on consumers--and marketers. One recent example is the advent of the term "omnichannel" marketing, which many struggle to differentiate from another relatively recent term--"multichannel" marketing. Still, those who are most enmeshed in the field say there is a key distinction between the two, and it's one that will have an impact on marketers as they continue to seek ways of having a meaningful impact on the consumers they hope to engage. And, importantly, it's less about technology than it may seem.

Arity Announces LexiLink

Arity Corporation, a Semantic Web technologies company working in knowledge management problem solving, has announced LexiLink, which gives life science professionals the ability to build and manage the complex knowledge bases that inform research and development. The Life Sciences rely on lexicons and ontologies to describe, analyze, and drive scientific investigations. LexiLink builds, curates, and manages multiple lexicons and ontologies in one web-based application.

LexiLink manages the provenance of concepts and attributes and provides alerts to specific changes in source lexicons that are relevant to the user. This allows users to absorb changes and new versions directly into their new lexicon. Developed in cooperation with Pfizer, Inc., LexiLink can import many lexicons and ontologies in the biomedical field such as UMLS extracts, MeSH, MedDRA, GO, GOA, and ChEBI. LexiLink can manage vocabularies with millions of entries. Companies can incorporate their existing, proprietary vocabularies as well as create new ones within LexiLink. They can also use LexiLink to export these vocabularies to feed text mining and other applications within the organization. LexiLink ships with extended web service APIs to set the stage for a range of knowledge management applications. LexiLink can be used alone or as a companion product to Arity's @tlas and EXPRESSway investigative research applications.

This tool was designed to let scientists view concepts, similar terms, and detailed information to instantly see relationships and hierarchies. They can annotate entries, view full synonym expansion, and establish links between terms across lexicons. LexiLink generates alerts whenever a linked concept is modified internally or externally (because LexiLink also lets users import lexicon updates without disrupting their customizations). And, LexiLink can automatically fix logic errors in imported data (such as parent relationships to ancestors).